Columbus City Council members unanimously agreed to appropriate additional money to the Columbus Animal Care Services (CACS) budget to help pay employees for the rest of this year.
The council passed the second reading of an ordinance to appropriate $43,000 from the city’s general fund to compensate part-time workers who carry out responsibilities inside the facility like feeding animals and keeping the place clean.
“We’re looking at an additional appropriation to help basically offset the cost of utilizing part-time employees over full-time employees to basically clean—I won’t say what, but you know. It’s the best utilization of employee allocation to use part-time employees for these instead of the (CACS) directors and administrators.”
CACS Director Nicohl Birdwell-Goodin said during the first reading on Sept. 17 that it’s not uncommon for a full-time person to have help with the cleaning, and having part-timers take care of that gives full-time employees the ability to focus on other areas.
The appropriation is on top of the original CACS budget of $144,000— Council member Kent Anderson, R-district 5, said during the first reading that he thinks there should be further discussion on the CACS budget.
“I think one of the things that we want to do is work with you and look for ways to be as efficient as we can with costs and resources,” Frey said on Sept. 17. “So yeah, we are more than willing to have that conversation, whether that’s budget committee or whoever wants to sit down and talk about that and go through those kind of strategies and that kind of discussion, but right now we just want somebody to clean up the pens.”
